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Bird
]] '''Birds' (Aves) are a clade of modern air-breathing, warm-blooded vertebrates. The ones that currently survive lack teeth, but possess a horny or ]]bony beak, are covered in feathers and can fly. Yet birds are not related to pterosaurs or modern bats (mammals), and instead, they are dinosaurs. Contray to popular beleif, birds are "reptiles" more properly called sauropsids. 'Iberomesornis, featured in '''Walking With Dinosaurs ep 4, was an early bird - an iberomesornithid - the size of a modern sparrow, with a wingspan of no more than 10-15 cm. It was colored brightly in the series, but in reality, just like modern birds of comparable size (songbirds, sparrows, oxpeckers 'from the epilogue to WWD, etc.) it was probably of a drab and mottled coloration that matched ''Iberomesornis surroundings, early Cretaceous woods, unlike the bright coloration it had in the series. It had a very small ]] '']]role in WWD, primarily as a distant cousin to the raptors also featured in that episode, probably because very little is known about its behavior. In the show, a flock of of ''Iberomesornis has harassed the star of the episode, the aircraft-sized pterosaur Ornithocheirus, and were in fact contrasted with it and the rest of the pterosaur tribe (i.e. Tapejara, etc). By holding a cameo of these birds, WWD revealed the difference between bird and pterosaur anatomy, how in fact they were not related at all, and how the birds will inherit the sky from these reptiles when they become extinct. '''Alexornis, from the Walking With Dinosaurs: 3D 'film is another example of such an early bird. '']] Little is known about it, but it probably behaved similarly to ''Iberomesornis and and the modern oxpeckers. It is shown to have led a semi-symbiotic relationship with the horned dinosaur Pachyrhinosaurus as well. Another 'Walking With Dinosaurs ''episode, the sixth, also mentions the birds while talking about the pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus, and the book version of the show mentions primitive birds in ep 5, but otherwise, the only other Mesozoic bird featured by Impossible Pictures is Hesperornis, featured in Sea Monsters. It was a member of another extinct bird clade - the hesperornithiforms, and was about the size of a human (2 m. tall). It was shaped roughly like a modern loon or another diving bird, but was probably even more helpless on land, than they are today, as their legs were too far back and too weak to support them on land. Hesperornis hunted fish and squid in the Mesozoic oceans, and was in turn prey both for land-dwelling dinosaurs and aquatic reptiles and giant fish. It also had retained teeth in its beak (However, these did not overlap with the keratinised areas.), just like the earlier birds, and it too died out during the K-pg event (or around that time), leaving the modern birds, palaeognaths and neognaths as the only bird families to survive in Cenozoic. Of these two families, only the neognaths are featured in Impossible Pictures works, and though they come from different families (Gastornis 'from '''Walking With Beasts '''was related to the ancestors of modern chickens and ducks, the 'Terror Birds '''from '''Walking With Beasts were either giant relatives of the cranes, rails and co. or a completely independent group of birds not related closely to any modern bird clan), they all have the feature of flightlessness, as they had evolved in conditions where no large mammal carnivores could successfully challenge them, However, they all died out in time, Gastornis by the end of Eocene epoch. The terror birds died out latery, by the Pliocene-Pleistocene epochs instead, alongside other flightless birds, both paleognaths and neognaths. More common, modern flying birds, however, have survived such extinctions and live along us even today, as demonstrated by the '''Oxpecker '''birds shot live in Africa at the end of WWD series. 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